Fit-out snagging in Dubai: the checklist before final payment

What snagging means on a commercial fit-out

A snag list (punch list in American contracts, the same document) records every item that falls short of the approved drawings and the specification you signed. The client or the client's consultant writes it, it is issued formally to the contractor, and it stays open until each line is fixed and re-inspected.

The comparison people reach for is a villa handover, where the walk is mostly about finishes and a developer's warranty carries the systems behind the wall. A commercial unit inverts that. Most of what can hurt you is mechanical or electrical, it sits above a ceiling you are about to close, and it is tied to a permit that lets you trade. A misaligned skirting costs you an afternoon. A fire alarm that fails to shut down the air handling unit on test costs you an opening date.

Scope decides how much you are actually inspecting. On a shell-and-core unit the contractor built everything from the bare slab up, so the inspection covers the full package. On a fitted or turnkey handover you inspect what was added and, more importantly, the interface with what was already there: the existing chilled water connection, the landlord's fire panel, the base-build drainage that your new pantry now feeds.

Budget real time for it. A small retail unit or a compact office takes two to three hours if the walk is done properly. A restaurant with a commercial kitchen, or a floor plate with plant rooms, runs past five hours and is often split over two visits, because the electrical and fire testing needs somebody from the contractor's side operating panels while somebody else stands in the room watching what happens.

Practical completion and final handover: two dates that decide when you pay

Practical completion is the point where the works are finished well enough for you to occupy and use the unit, with only minor items outstanding. In FIDIC-based contracts it is marked by a taking-over certificate. It matters for money because it normally releases the first half of retention, and it matters for risk because it starts the defects liability period running.

Final handover comes later. Snags closed and re-inspected, the document pack delivered, authority certificates in hand, keys and access cards transferred, the site cleaned and the contractor's temporary works removed. This is the event your closing payment should hang on.

The common failure is declaring practical completion on a unit that has never been tested. Testing and commissioning is a precondition of practical completion, not a snag to be closed afterwards. If the air balancing has not been done and the fire alarm cause and effect has not been witnessed, the unit is not practically complete, whatever the programme says. Sign it anyway and you have released retention and started a twelve month clock on a building nobody has proven.

Write down who declares practical completion and how. The contractor gives written notice that the works are ready, a joint inspection follows within a stated window, and then either the certificate is issued or a written list of what is missing is. Without that sequence, practical completion becomes an argument about a date rather than a decision about a building.

What the contractor hands over on paper

The document pack is the part clients forget to specify and then chase for months. Make it a written release condition for both the closing payment and the first half of retention, because a pack assembled in the week after handover is a pack assembled from memory.

Ask for all of it in one indexed folder with a contents page. A dump of 400 unnamed photographs of certificates in a shared drive technically satisfies the clause and helps nobody.

• As-built drawings. Architectural, reflected ceiling and MEP layouts marked up to what was actually installed, issued as PDF and in the native file format. The ceiling void changes on every job, and the as-built is what the next contractor drills against.
• O&M manuals. Equipment schedules with model and serial numbers, filter sizes, maintenance intervals, supplier and service contacts, and operating instructions for anything with a controller.
• Testing and commissioning records. Air balancing figures against design, fire alarm cause and effect results, emergency lighting duration test, earth continuity and insulation resistance readings, water pressure and drainage tests, and kitchen extraction airflow where there is a kitchen.
• Warranty certificates issued in your company's name, each with a start date. A warranty naming the contractor is worth very little to you in month nine.
• The approved drawing set, plus every authority certificate the works required.
• Paint references, tile and stone batch numbers, and the spare stock agreed in the contract. Two boxes of the same tile batch in a store cupboard settle a lot of future arguments.

Authority sign-offs that gate the handover

Your handover is not yours to schedule alone. The works have to be closed out by whichever authority approved them, and until that happens you have a finished room with no legal permission to trade from it.

Sequence these before the client snagging walk rather than after it. Every authority inspection generates comments, and those comments become snags. Walking the unit with your own list first, then handing the contractor a second list from Civil Defence two weeks later, doubles the de-snagging round for no reason at all.

• Building completion. Mainland fit-outs are approved and closed out by Dubai Municipality. In free zones and master developments the equivalent authority holds the same role, and the submission route varies by location, which is worth settling at design stage rather than at handover. If you are unsure where your unit sits, start with which authority approves a fit-out in your location.
• Dubai Civil Defence. Fire alarm and detection, sprinklers and fire fighting equipment, emergency lighting, exit signage, fire rated doors and fire stopping. The inspection is a site visit against approved drawings, and the completion certificate is what your landlord and your licence renewal will both ask for.
• DEWA. The move from the builder's temporary supply to a permanent metered connection under your account, with the load matching what was approved. Leaving this late is one of the more common reasons a finished unit sits dark for a fortnight.
• Scope-specific bodies. Food Control for any kitchen, the health regulator for a clinic or pharmacy, and the landlord's own fit-out manager in a mall, who normally issues his own clearance before the hoarding comes down.

The inspection itself, system by system

Walk the unit with the approved drawings, the specification and the landlord's fit-out manual in hand. An inspection without drawings turns into a conversation about taste. Ask the contractor to have power on, the fire panel accessible and an engineer present, because half of the list below cannot be checked by looking.

Open the ceiling voids. Most of the expensive defects on that list hide above a tile, and a contractor who objects to a void being opened at snagging is telling you something worth hearing.

• Electrical. Distribution board labelled and matching the single line diagram, every socket and switch tested live, circuits balanced across phases, dimming and scene control working, data points terminated and tested rather than just pulled through.
• Fire alarm and suppression. Detector positions matching the approved layout, sounders audible in every enclosed room including toilets and stores, cause and effect witnessed (air handling shutdown, magnetic door releases, shutter drops), sprinkler heads clear of the ceiling grid and not painted over.
• Emergency lighting and exit signage. Run the battery test for the rated duration with the mains off. Holding the test switch for five seconds proves a lamp works and proves nothing whatsoever about a battery.
• HVAC. Airflow measured at each diffuser against the balancing report rather than felt with a hand, thermostats controlling the zone printed on the drawing, access panels to every fan coil unit and damper, condensate drains falling correctly and tested with water.
• Plumbing and drainage. Fill and drain every trap, run every tap, flush every WC, then go back into the ceiling void twenty minutes later and look. Leaks appear after a system has been under pressure for a while, which is why the void gets opened at snagging.
• Ceilings and partitions. Grid square to the room, tiles cut cleanly at the perimeter, service penetrations trimmed, fire stopping visible where services pass through rated walls, partitions taken to the slab where the specification says so. A partition stopped at ceiling level is an acoustic complaint waiting for your first confidential meeting.
• Doors, ironmongery and joinery. Even gaps, closers adjusted, locks and access control working from both sides, drawer and door alignment, worktop joints, edge banding, sealant lines.
• Finishes. Paint checked under raking light rather than overhead light, tile lippage at thresholds, skirting scribed to uneven walls, floor transitions level.
• Front of house. Shopfront glazing and seals, signage illumination and its isolator, external lighting, shutter operation, and anything the landlord's manual sets a standard for.
• Kitchens and specialist rooms. Extraction airflow against design, gas pressure test certificate, grease trap access, floor gully falls, stainless steel joints sealed.

Writing a snag list the contractor cannot argue with

A snag list fails when items are written as opinions. "Paint looks bad in the meeting room" starts a debate. "Meeting room 2, north wall, roller marks visible under the wall washer at 1.5 m above finished floor level, photo 34" starts a repair.

Give every item a location taken from the approved drawing, a description of the observable fault, a numbered photograph, and a severity grade:

Number the items once and never renumber them. Revision four of a list where item 12 has quietly become item 9 destroys the audit trail, and that is where disputes start. Keep status and a closed date against each line in the same shared file rather than emailing a fresh attachment every round.

Separate snags from variations while you write, because the contractor will separate them anyway. A snag is contracted work done wrong or left unfinished, fixed at the contractor's cost. A different finish, an extra socket or a repositioned wall is a variation, priced and instructed separately. Lists that mix the two stall at the first review meeting, and the genuine defects end up hostage to a pricing argument.

Date-stamp the photographs. In a defects discussion nine months later, a photograph with a date is evidence and a recollection is not.

• A. Safety, compliance or occupancy blocking. The unit does not hand over until it is closed.
• B. A contractual defect that has to be closed before the closing payment is released.
• C. Cosmetic or minor, closeable during the defects period by agreement.

De-snagging, and who fixes what for how long

De-snagging is the fix round plus the re-inspection that follows it. Treat the re-inspection as compulsory. An item marked closed in a spreadsheet by the party who caused it is a claim, not a fact.

Dubai sets no statutory window for closing snags on private fit-out work. If you want the contractor tied to a response time, put it in the contract before you sign: a stated number of working days from issue of the list for A and B items, a named person to receive the list, and a consequence if the window passes. Requested after handover, the same thing is a negotiation you will probably lose.

The defects liability period on Dubai fit-out work is usually twelve months from practical completion. Retail and hospitality projects, and anything with a high specification, are frequently pushed to twenty-four, sometimes across the whole works and sometimes against named elements such as joinery, a shopfront, a specialist floor or the extraction system. Landlords drive many of those requirements, and a mall fit-out manual will often set the period before a contractor is even appointed.

What the period covers is defective workmanship and defective materials. What it does not cover is fair wear, misuse, damage caused by other trades you bring in later, or equipment you supplied yourself. Write that distinction into the contract, because the argument in month eight is always about which bucket a failure falls into.

Above the defects period sits decennial liability under the UAE civil code: ten years of joint liability on the contractor and the supervising engineer where a building suffers total or partial collapse, or where a defect threatens its stability or safety. It cannot be contracted out of. Most fit-out never reaches that regime, because most fit-out is non-structural. It becomes live the moment somebody cores a slab for a new riser, alters a core wall, hangs plant the floor was never designed to carry, or builds a mezzanine.

Retention and the final payment

Retention is the percentage held back from each certified payment, commonly five to ten percent on Dubai fit-out work and usually capped so it stops growing once it reaches a sensible figure. Its purpose is to fund the correction of defects if the contractor will not come back for them.

Release it in halves against named documents. The first half at practical completion, evidenced by the taking-over certificate. The balance when the defects liability period expires. A schedule that releases retention "after twelve months" without naming the certificate that starts the clock leaves both sides reading the same sentence differently, which is one of several reasons a fit-out payment schedule has to be written against events rather than dates.

Keep a separate closing payment at handover as well, and keep it meaningful. Retention on its own rarely motivates anyone to chase the last twenty C items. Write its release conditions as deliverables: snag list closed and re-inspected, document pack delivered, authority certificates issued, and in a leased unit, the landlord's signed clearance.

When something is outstanding, withhold the value of what is outstanding rather than the whole payment. Freezing an entire certificate over one unfinished item usually converts a two week delay into a two month one, because the contractor's suppliers stop before he does. A contractor who would rather not leave cash with you for a year can offer a retention bond instead, letting each certificate be paid in full against a bank guarantee. That is a fair trade, provided the bond's validity runs past the end of the defects period.

How we run handover

We snag our own work before we invite anyone. The site team walks the unit with the approved drawings and closes its own list first, because a client walk that produces ninety items is a walk that should have happened a week earlier.

Commissioning happens before we call practical completion. Air balancing figures, fire alarm cause and effect, emergency lighting duration, electrical test sheets. We would rather find a fault with our own engineer on site than in front of a client and a landlord's consultant.

The document pack gets built during the job. As-builts are marked up as services go in, warranty certificates are requested in the client's name at the point of order, and the O&M folder grows week by week.

Handover conditions differ by location and we plan around that difference. The Saudi Dates Centre unit at Dubai Hills Mall closed out against the mall's own handover requirements as much as against construction ones. The offices at Platinum Tower in JLT for Solvu Solutions and AD Tyres ran against building management rules for access and testing windows. At Gashisha on Sheikh Zayed Road the kitchen and the fire systems governed the opening date, so that is where the slack in the programme sat.